SABC betrays South Africa's young democracy

This week, South Africans go to the polls for their fifth democratic
elections since 1994, but despite constitutional guarantees of media freedom,
the vast majority of South Africans who vote will do so informed only by the positive
news and information carried by a public broadcaster widely criticized
for its partiality to the ruling party.

Once dubbed "his master's voice" for its sycophantic
relationship to the ruling National Party and its role in maintaining apartheid
rule, the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) has travelled a circuitous
path since 1994. At first reveling in its new role as a public broadcaster,
answerable to an independent regulator,
and determined to cover all aspects of the "new" South Africa, the SABC in
recent years has been poisoned by factionalism among ruling party loyalists and
crippled by self-censorship.

Today, South Africa's broadcasting environment is
significantly diversified, with numerous independent voices on air. The minority
who can afford to pay for print publications, satellite television, and online access
have a limitless variety of news and opinion. But for the majority of the
country's 51 million people, the radio and TV channels of the SABC are almost the
only options. The SABC remains the largest newsgathering
organization in the country, owning three of the four national free-to-air
TV stations, 18 regional and national radio stations, and one Africa-wide radio
channel.
It also broadcasts in all South Africa's 11 official languages, plus indigenous
Khoisan tongues !Xu and Khwe.

The central role of the SABC was recognized 21 years ago, as
South Africa haltingly negotiated its way towards democracy. A new board was
appointed in 1993, ahead of the first elections, to begin the transformation
from a state to a public broadcaster. In a 2012 obituary to the SABC's first
post-apartheid chief executive, Zwelakhe Sisulu, Pippa Green recounted
how Sisulu had reassured his staff that they would never need to "look over
your shoulder because I will protect you from the politicians," and how veteran
journalist and political commentator Allister Sparks had described Sisulu as a
"heat shield" for the SABC's news department.

The contrast with today is sharp. Respected staff members
have resigned in numbers; two boards have collapsed in the past five years; the
communications
minister (who is responsible for the broadcasting sector and to whom the
board reports) was axed in mid-2013, and opposition parties allege
that the current board is stacked with ruling-party affiliates. Recently, SABC
board chairwoman Ellen Tshabalala told
a public meeting that residents should vote for the ruling African National
Congress (ANC).

In February this year, Thuli Madonsela, the public protector (a
statutory ombudsman empowered to investigate "any conduct in state affairs or
public administration in any sphere of government") called for the replacement
of the SABC's acting chief operations officer, Hlaudi Motsoeneng. In a damning
report entitled, "When
governance and ethics fail," she found him guilty on a number of counts,
including irregularly increasing salaries of some staff and purging others,
leading to expensive court actions and settlements. In direct defiance of the public
protector, board chairwoman Tshabalala said she had no intention of firing Motsoeneng,
according to news
reports. However, the SABC
reported that Tshabalala had not discounted the report and that the board
was considering its response.

Last month SABC management told
staffers that they should not broadcast footage of crowds attending opposition
rallies in the run-up to the May 7 elections, while Tshabalala warned employees
that their cellphones may be monitored by the National Intelligence Agency
because they worked at a "national key point" and should not leak information,
according to news
reports. South Africa's National Key Points Act is an apartheid-era law
restricting access to and coverage of any building or location deemed such a
point. CPJ's efforts to reach the SABC's spokesman, Kaizer Kganyago, for
comment were unsuccessful.

A former head of news and current
affairs at the post-apartheid SABC and now director of the Wits Radio Academy at
Johannesburg's Wits University, Franz Kruger, told CPJ that "the real danger to
editorial independence was less intervention from on high, although that does
occur, but self-censorship and excessive caution." He said that all too often, editorial
staff "just don't want to
rock the boat," and sometimes stayed away from stories "just in case it leads
to trouble."

As political parties have intensified their campaigns ahead
of this week's poll, the SABC has pulled the political advertisements of two opposition
parties--the Democratic Alliance (DA) and the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF). In
the first instance, the DA took the SABC to the
Independent Communications Authority of South Africa (ICASA) for banning its
45-second "Ayisafani"
(it's not the same) advert, allegedly because it brought the police into
disrepute by pointing out instances of police brutality. The DA won its case,
but then the South African Police Services issued a similar complaint over the
same advert, which ICASA upheld,
and the party was ordered to excise the offending claim. (The DA has since produced
a second advertisement, which it initially claimed on Twitter had
also been banned, but this was not so, according
to news reports.)

ICASA upheld the SABC's decision not to air the EFF advertisement. The SABC claimed
language in the EFF spot calling on supporters to destroy e-tolls (a system of
electronic tollgates on the road network around Gauteng, the country's economic
hub) was likely to incite illegal or criminal acts, according to news
reports.

It is perhaps little wonder that in less than a month before
the May 7 national poll, a leading Sunday newspaper mourned the death of the
SABC in an editorial headlined, "Here lies the SABC #RIP," castigating the
behavior of Motsoeneng and concluding, "For all intents and purposes, the most
vital institution of democracy--the public broadcaster--as we imagined it in the
early 1990s is dead and buried."

[Reporting from Cape
Town]

Sue Valentine, CPJ's Africa program coordinator, has worked as a journalist in print and radio in South Africa since the late 1980s, including at The Star newspaper in Johannesburg and as the executive producer of a national daily current affairs radio show on the SABC, South Africa's public broadcaster.